Rescue satellite gets close to NASA's doomed telescope, even if it can't save it. CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A private spacecraft that was supposed to supply a lifeline to NASA’s Swift Observatory managed to get close to the sinking telescope and even snap photos two weeks after the rescue was abandoned.

But the three-armed robotic salvager had to turn away because of low fuel, according to Katalyst Space Technologies, which attempted the daring operation.

“We got so close, but so far,” Katalyst CEO Ghonhee Lee told The Associated Press this week.

Katalyst’s Link spacecraft got within 15 kilometres (nine miles) of Swift on Tuesday, using its own sensors to gather data on the doomed telescope for NASA. The rescue effort had already been called off in August because of Link’s own troubles in orbit, but the company wanted the practice for future satellite service calls.

Link went into an uncontrollable spin soon after rocketing to Swift’s rescue in July. Flight controllers managed to reduce the tumble and stabilize the spacecraft, using up precious fuel. In the end, there wasn’t enough fuel remaining to boost the aging Swift to a higher, longer-lasting orbit so it could continue observing the cosmos.

Lee blamed Link’s problems on the rush to get it flying. The mission was thrown together in just nine months, and engineers often had to grab whatever was available instead of waiting for the preferred parts, he said.

NASA paid the company US$30 million to carry out the attempt, which was always going to be rushed. Both sides viewed it as an experiment with little to lose, although no one wanted a wreck that would unleash clouds of space debris.

“Unfortunately, it wasn’t the outcome that we were expecting,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said following Sunday’s launch of the Roman Space Telescope. “But that’s exactly the type of missions that we should be flying at NASA. We will learn from that.”

Isaacman said it makes sense to extend the life of a valuable spacecraft, especially if the cost to salvage it is less than to replace it. That’s why the Roman telescope was designed to be refuellable even though it’s headed toward an observation point one million miles (1.6 million kilometres) away.

It’s unlikely that Link has enough fuel left to attempt another close approach to Swift, according to Lee. But it can keep exercising its three-foot (one-metre) arms and provide important data before it reenters and burns up in the atmosphere in the next few weeks, he said.

Launched in 2004, Swift has a little more time remaining in orbit, depending on how active the sun is. Intense solar storms of recent years are responsible for bringing the telescope down much sooner than expected. As of Friday, its orbit had dropped to 208 miles (335 kilometres), barely half as high as when it set out to scan some of the biggest explosions in the universe.

NASA launches Roman telescope on cosmic mapping mission

WASHINGTON — Amid a constrained launch market, satellite operators are increasingly emphasizing to investors and customers that they have lined up launch capacity, even if it is uncertain when those vehicles will be available.

Spain’s ‘Galactic Shepherd’ to watch total eclipse from DIY observatory. SAN AGUSTIN DEL POZO, Spain - In a tiny Spanish farming village, retired shepherd Joaquin Tapioles is preparing to watch next week’s first-in-a-century total solar eclipse from the observatory he built after being inspired by the mysteries of the skies as a boy.

The first total eclipse visible from the Iberian peninsula since 1912 is set to draw skywatchers from across Spain and abroad.

A self-taught astronomer who goes by the nickname the “Galactic Shepherd,” Tapioles, 67, will be watching with his family on August 12 from the rotating dome that juts out among San Agustin del Pozo’s red-brick buildings.

He operates the telescope he designed and assembled himself using a video game controller to track the sky.

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover captures images of ‘sea of polygons’ with honeycomb textures.

NASA’s Curiosity rover has noticed little patches of “honeycomb-like textures” on Mars several times before, but for a few days in June, it spotted a “sea” of them that stretched as far as the mobile science laboratory could see.

In a press release Wednesday, NASA shared images of the polygonal fractures, or polygons, that the rover captured while it climbed a Martian valley dubbed “Valle Grande” on June 19 and 20.

NASA said the newly discovered polygons, which typically measure out to be about 1.5 to three inches (four to eight centimetres) each, were “nothing at the scale discovered in Valle Grande.”

“We’ve seen a lot of fascinating landscapes through Curiosity’s eyes, but this sea of polygons took our breath away,” Ashwin Vasavada, the mission’s project scientist, said in a statement. “We measured their shapes and chemistry carefully and are hopeful there are clues in the data as to how these features formed.”

According to NASA’s press release, various processes can help form the honeycomb textures, such as a sequence of warm and cold temperatures, or “compression” – pushing water out of the sediment. Some of the mysterious polygons the rover previously found were “clearly formed as mud cracks,” NASA said.

Curiosity made other key discoveries since it landed on the red planet in 2011. According to the press release, the rover discovered that billions of years ago, Mars had lakes and streams, and it essentially had the “water, chemistry, and nutrients to support microbial life.”

SpaceX launches Starship on another test flight, this time with the most advanced Starlinks

Final contenders revealed for 2026 Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition. Four miles from the Eiffel Tower, a photographer captured the full moon’s path over a pink Paris skyline. In China, another photographer snapped a night sky of falling stars.

These are just two of the submissions short-listed in the 18th annual Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition. Organized by the Royal Observatory Greenwich, the competition drew nearly 4,000 submissions from 769 photographers in 66 countries. Entries include photographs of auroras, galaxies and landscapes of Earth’s moon.

#WASHINGTON — More than two dozen major #NASA projects say they have been affected by the loss of a fifth of NASA’s civil servant workforce in the last year, raising concerns about delays and cost increases.

The Government Accountability Office, in a July 23 report assessing NASA’s major projects in development, said that 25 of the 36 projects included in its study reported feeling effects from last year’s departure of 22% of the agency’s civil servants through deferred retirement programs.

“The civil servant departures have left NASA’s workforce out of balance with NASA’s programmatic needs,” the GAO stated in its report.

The report included several examples of science and exploration projects dealing with the loss of personnel. Orion, for example, lost 10% of its civil servants, and officials said they faced “challenges in filling several key positions,” although other agency officials said they took steps to mitigate those concerns. The Space Launch System program lost nearly 20% of its civil servant workforce, and the program is now considering adding workforce as a formal risk to the program.

Another example in the report was DAVINCI, a Venus mission led by the Goddard Space Flight Center that suffered the loss of key personnel as well as the threat of cancellation in NASA’s fiscal year 2026 budget request. The mission was not able to immediately replace those personnel and had to revise planned risk-reduction activities for the mission as a result. DAVINCI was funded in the final fiscal year 2026 appropriations bill, allowing the project to restore staffing, but it is among the dozens of missions facing cancellation in the administration’s fiscal year 2027 budget request.

Goddard is the NASA center hardest hit by the workforce reductions, losing 34% of its civil servants. NASA Headquarters suffered the fewest losses, at 11%. Other centers reported reductions of between 16% and 28% in their civil servant workforces.

SpaceX moves Starship launch attempt to Thursday

#FAA closes Starship review ahead of SpaceX’s next test flight this week. WASHINGTON - The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration on Monday closed its review into a SpaceX Starship booster’s return failure that occurred during a flight test in May, clearing the way for Elon Musk’s space company to launch the rocket’s next test flight from Texas as soon as this week.

Reporting by Joey Roulette